If you factor in your expenses, make a personal profit every month, and invest the difference into assets that produce c

I’m in no position to comment on most of the things I write about. But in this instance, I’m particularly unqualified — OSM has amassed a long-lived, fantastically diverse, and inherently fragmented community. I’ve never even commented in one of the forums.

In a more recent talk from State of the Map in July 2020, Jennings presented updated figures showing that the torrent of corporate contributions only increased from 2018 to 2019 and beyond with Amazon and Apple trending along the steepest slopes:

Writing obvious comments. We’ve all seen comments like this before. They don’t explain anything but focus on what the code is doing (e.g. a comment like “looping over the products” when there is a foreach loop). Whenever you’re in that situation, don’t write a comment that focuses on what the code is doing. Focus on the why of this code instead.

Also interesting to note is Mapbox’s apparent decision to stop investing significantly into direct OSM edits and contributions. Apple was responsible for more edits in 2019 than Mapbox accounted for in its entire corporate history…I don’t have a good explanation for that. I wonder if they decided their effort could be more highly leveraged on core web mapping technology rather than manual digitization.

Dividend payments add up and can help you with some of your expenses as they grow in size. But get clear on how you want to make money. If you want to make money working from home, start pursuing side hustles that enable you to work from home.

My team took SoftSound’s speech recognition algorithms, and devised ways to combine them with video, text and image recognition, to create search engines for TV, film and radio archives. We created all kinds of cool things, like editing software allowing a video to be edited just by cutting and pasting the script. This was a little too far ahead of its time to be a hot seller, but we won some awards and got a lot of good press.

Jennings noted, importantly, that as of 2018 non-corporate editors were still responsible for the majority of activity on OSM (about 70% of all edits) and were significantly more active on edits to buildings, places of interest, and amenities.⁴

For areas where corporate teams are active, on average, the non-corporate editors are now responsible for less than 25% of total road editing activity, which is down from closer to 70% in 2017.²

Lack of practice. As we all know, practice makes perfect. So if you want to grow as a developer, you need to practice more. The biggest mistake you can make is to not learn any new things every once in a while. If you want to learn something new, like a programming language, you probably have to do it outside of your daily job. That’s an investment that you have to make in yourself in order to stay relevant.

Seeing people use our speech-based search engines was a revelation. It taught me that people love to spot mistakes, and use them as a reason to dismiss even the most obviously useful of innovations. This was a similar phenomenon to the YouTube clips of Scottish people talking to early versions of Siri.

http://live247.gruposio.es/mun/Video-Strasbourg-Nimes-Olympique-v-en-gb-1avx30122020-8.php

http://stream88.colomboserboli.com/urf/videos-strasbourg-v-nimes-olympique-v-fr-fr-1hdh-19.php

http://news24.acaps.cat/gms/Video-leixoes-v-oirense-v-pt-pt-1zvx2-16.php

https://assifonte.org/media/ept/Video-Eupen-Genk-v-en-gb-sjb-.php

http://news24.acaps.cat/gms/videos-leixoes-v-oirense-v-pt-pt-1mhj2-28.php

http://live247.gruposio.es/mun/video-Strasbourg-Nimes-Olympique-v-en-gb-1rxu30122020-10.php

http://stream88.colomboserboli.com/urf/Video-Lorient-Monaco-v-en-gb-1hyq30122020-.php

http://vert.actiup.com/gwk/Video-olot-v-osasuna-v-es-es-1tkp-24.php

https://assifonte.org/media/ept/v-ideos-Eupen-Genk-v-en-gb-kir-.php

http://stream88.colomboserboli.com/urf/videos-Lorient-Monaco-v-en-gb-1vmu-18.php

http://vert.actiup.com/gwk/videos-olot-v-osasuna-v-es-es-1lxi-8.php

http://news24.acaps.cat/gms/Video-leixoes-v-oirense-v-pt-pt-1yec2-4.php

http://svt.munich.es/zzr/v-ideos-RS-Berkane-Tevragh-Zeina-v-en-gb-1izv-.php

https://assifonte.org/media/ept/videos-Eupen-Genk-v-en-gb-nej30122020-.php

https://assifonte.org/media/ept/Video-Manchester-United-Manchester-City-v-en-gb-yfv30122020-.php

https://assifonte.org/media/ept/v-ideos-Manchester-United-Manchester-City-v-en-gb-bbt-.php

http://live247.gruposio.es/mun/video-salitas-fc-v-alamal-atbara-v-fr-fr-1nmq-7.php

http://news24.acaps.cat/gms/Video-leixoes-v-oirense-v-pt-pt-1ckp2-4.php

https://assifonte.org/media/ept/videos-Manchester-United-Manchester-City-v-en-gb-lyd30122020-.php

http://vert.actiup.com/gwk/v-ideos-olot-v-osasuna-v-es-es-1jqs-12.php

writing this article I didn’t have in mind any intention to give “instructions” based on this hypothesis. It’s just meant as an exploratory analysis concluding with a hypothesis that’s up to you, the reader, to interpret however you wish.

Underestimating the workload. Estimating the workload is one of the hardest things in software development. How often have you heard “I could easily do this feature in one story point” in a Scrum refinement? Chances are that things aren’t quite that easy and your intended solution won’t work. When it comes to estimates, make sure you count in time for things like testing as well — not just for the developer.

But one thing that is clear even to a casual observer like me: one of the consequences of increased corporate involvement in OSM is a significant backlash from members within the OSM community that feel the community (and data) is being irreversibly adulterated by these profiteering intruders.

If you factor in your expenses, make a personal profit every month, and invest the difference into assets that produce cashflow, you’ve already made it. Time will compound your initial successes to make this truth more apparent.

In that talk, Jennings outlines the findings presented in his research. Not only was there already significant corporate investment happening in OSM in 2018, but in many cases corporate editors were responsible for the majority of edits in the specific geographies they were focused on. For instance: